The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. - from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges
Among other things, Borges’ short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, first published in 1940, is about the gradual and deliberate transmogrification of history, facts, memory, and reality itself by "chess masters", by "a scattered dynasty of solitary men".
In this fictional story, which begins with a discussion of ideas between historically real characters, history and fiction become inextricably entwined. Within the story itself, like the totalitarian governments that were ascendant at the time Borges was writing the story, an obscure philosophical sect, through subversive literary techniques, revises history and slowly creates fictional and metaphorical geographies that eventually supplant the previously known universe.
Since the unparalleled tragedy of 9/11, the neocon-driven Bush administration has been dismantling facts, revising history, indulging in prevarication and obfuscation, and using Eric Arthur Blair’s dystopian novel as an operational handbook. The extant miasma of the American condition, inflicted upon us and perpetrated globally by the Bush Administration is predicated upon one thing: the co-opting of the 9/11 attacks. The profound, immeasurable, and incomprehensible pain of these attacks obliterated our sense of reality, and the ensuing emotional, political, intellectual, and nationalistic reactions were conflicted by proximity to the trauma.
The American President, George W. Bush, had just come back from a month long vacation, the longest since Nixon was President, his poll approval numbers were in negative territory, his proposals to privatize social security and his foreign policy of anathema toward international treaties, called "exceptionalism" (the concept that the U.S.A. is the world’s only superpower and is thusly exempt of any necessity to comply with any treaties between the rest of the world’s countries) were both receiving vociferous criticism. The embarrassing incident of the U.S. aircraft that collided with a Chinese fighter and was forced down into the People’s Republic of China in April was slowly fading. Then, instantly, like a Phoenix, Bush arose from his stupor, stood upon the smoldering rubble of the World Trade Center, now called Ground Zero, and declared prophetically, "Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not have the distance of history, but our responsibility to history is clear, to answer these attacks, and rid the world of evil." In our national state of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, the hyperbole and implicit machinations of the words "rid the world of evil" did not resonate within our perspicacity. Bush’s and McCain’s usurpation of our national tragedy has been used since without compunction.
The pain of that day is still so graphic and unequivocal that words such as "Nine/Eleven", "Osama", "Al Qaeda", "World Trade Center", and "War on Terror" are psychological inducements toward fear, anger, and confusion, and these words are used precisely for this reason by Bush and now McCain. Progressives, Liberals, the Democrats, and the American people need to realize that these attacks happened while these people, i.e. the Bush Administration and the Republicans, were at the helm. While this should have been a point of shame and culpability for them, it has been used as a rallying cry and excuse for every abomination that they inflicted upon our foreign policies, our civil liberties, our national security, and our international reputation. Our own failure is that we did not reclaim the tragedies of 9/11 as a point of origin for discussions pointing a finger at the Bush Administration. Instead, for the neocons and Republicans, especially the hyper-belligerent John McCain, it was the carte blanche that they were hoping for to run rampant over the status quo of humanity.
From the cynically named Patriot Act(s) and terms like Extraordinary Rendition, to the calculated obfuscations applied to hide the illegal methodologies used to circumcise and circumscribe the fourth, first, fifth, sixth, and ninth amendments, among others, of the Constitution (in fact, this article by David Cole says that all of our Constitutional freedoms have been jeopardized "but the right to bear arms and the guarantee against the quartering of soldiers"), the Republican supplicants, with the help of many capitulating Democrats, have ineluctably changed not only our ability to decipher propaganda from fact, but have also weakened our tendency and ability to be outraged – they have made us impotent and ignorant. On August 29, 2008 John McCain committed the most cynical1 act of political recklessness since, well perhaps since the incipient Republicans’ chant for more offshore oil drilling, the planet be damned.
Now that the presidential campaigns are in full cry, following the painful pageantry of the conventions, the formerly scattered (resigned, fired, or banished) neocon braintrust of the Bush administration has reanimated into McCain’s advisory cabal, those, that is, who were not formerly (or are currently) corporate lobbyists – they form the foundation of his campaign. The Bushites forté is meme building. They write speeches that offer a potpouri of prevarication – Palin’s convention speech was written by Matthew Scully, an experienced speechwriter who served two stints in the White House, most recently for President George W. Bush – and barbarous memes that leech on to the listeners’ subconscience like spiked retroviruses, the modis operandi of the right-wing talk-radio hate peddlars. They spew out the lies and the hatred and see what sticks, what demented spirit will take up the hate meme and act upon it. Like Bill Moyers said on a recent edition of his PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal, "You cannot un-ring a bell."
Try and you'll find yourself an "enemy of the people." One Republican official told journalists in St. Paul, "We will get with you if you keep messing with us." And as John McCain and Sarah Palin barnstormed the nation this week, crowds that came out to see them booed members of the press.
(Incidentally, this episode of BMJ is one that scrutinizes the frightening and fatal effects of the hate speech shouted by right-wing fanatics like Michael Savage, Neil Boortz, Glenn Beck, Michael Reagan, Jim Quinn, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et al, and should be required viewing for all Americans.)
With her script written, Sarah Palin took her place beside the white knight as his kemo sabe and began ringing the bell of lies that took the press and the blogs a couple of weeks to damper. And while the vicissitudes of a gullible electorate have shifted somewhat, the Bushian clappers will not stop the bell’s ringing - and what should have been an abject disqualifier, the selection will continue to threaten our political reality into the wee hours of November 5th.
Although there exists an actual governor Sarah Palin (as far as we know), the Republican candidate for vice president whom we see in political advertisements, whom we saw and heard at the Republican Convention, who gives speeches at political rallies and who recently granted an interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson, is a fictional character, an illusion, an imaginary construct fabricated by marketing engineers, political consultants, lobbyists, and febrile former Bush administration speech writers and strategists.
John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film adaptation of Richard Condon’s novel, The Manchurian Candidate, is a Cold War political thriller steeped in paranoia that takes place after the Korean War and involves American war heroes who have been brainwashed and "programmed" to commit political assassinations back in the United States. In the book, as in the first film adaptation, there is malicious, incestuous, and plotting mother who is pulling all the strings, and a stepfather who is a McCarthy-like senator. In Condon’s pulp spy novel (Louis Menand called Condon "Mickey Spillane with an MFA") there are scenes that take place in Wainwright, Alaska and plot lines such as the character of the senator who has lied about a war injury to his foot, when in actuality he was bitten in the foot by an Eskimo woman whose igloo he visited when he was searching for sex.
In 2004, Jonathon Demme remade The Manchurian Candidate with some plot twists: the brainwashed war heroes are from the Gulf War, and the central antagonist, the son of the manipulating mother and right-wing stepfather, becomes a vice presidential candidate, while his running mate is the target of another brainwashed assassin.
In the thoroughly-imagined, Sarah Palin version, she is chosen (by sinister political/government operatives) to be the Republican vice presidential candidate precisely because she is essentially unknown, from an unknowable place, with a homespun-Americana biography and a family that would seem as endemic to Georgia or Mississippi as they are to Alaska, i.e., archetypal worker-bee Republicans. A plot to have her elderly boss, President McCain – easily elected in a rigged election – suffer an apparent heart attack in his first month of office puts her in place as the "stepford" President of the United States of America. Of course, this is all fiction, political paranoia, off-the-deep-end conspiracy theory - madness.
Any definition of what constitutes madness will undoubtedly be construed as subjective at least, and, propaganda, by those who would confer their own subjectivity upon it; a point illustrated inadvertently within this circumspect comment upon political discourse by the, sadly, late David Foster Wallace2 (from the November 2003 issue of the Believer):
The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or "dialogue"); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community. My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it’s like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that’s having the problems ours is.
While I do not refute any aspect of the seeming futility of open jaws on either side of a line drawn in the sand screaming at each other, I do not necessarily think that shouting to be heard is a bad thing. It is not easy to be heard above the din of the ceaseless Sturm und Drang of hype and spin and the cacophony of those vying for pyretic position. Mr. Foster Wallace says, "Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying." But truth is black-and-white – irrefutable, apodeictic, immutable – to the believer. Try telling a person on either side of the abortion or the death penalty debate that there are gray areas.
Mr. Foster Wallace also concludes that literary types should aspire to empathy, i.e., seeing through the eyes of your adversary, in this case. My own preference is for a Socratic dialectic that methodically attempts to eliminate prejudices and detritus (non-facts) from an argument, until a conclusion, supposedly truthful, can be reached; not that these methods are mutually excusive. But I do not need to get inside Cheney’s head (nor would I if I could) to understand that his neo-conservative ideologies are anathema to my own. Nevertheless, I agree with Mr. Foster Wallace that digressions into hate speech, personal attacks that reference all manner of fulsome effluvia (apologies to Mr. Vonnegut), and digress into an abyss of rhetoric from which there is no return are part of the madness, not of any serious discourse.
Nevertheless, the full throttle of the diametrically opposed presidential campaigns are barreling toward each other like freight trains on the same track, the proverbial switchman asleep at the switch. The stakes are absolutely existential. The spoils for the neocons could be American global hegemony, ownership of the world’s energy supplies, Executive Branch usurpation of the United States of America’s (and thus, the world’s) entire system of finance, perpetual wars - against the Muslim world, the Occidental world, the Russians, all non-Christians – and a corporate ruling class of unimaginable wealth, ruling over a mass population of indentured servitude. The less paranoid version has the Constitutional United States of America remain free, united, and intact, as the Founding Fathers intended.
Those right-wing talk show screamers spit out their puerile version of patriotism (and rail against all the vile liberals who they say have none of it) and deny reality with every syllable. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were justified, enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture (and if they are, who gives a shit?), extraordinary rendition is a myth, the Surge won the war, and on and on.
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." (George Orwell, from a subsection called Indifference to Reality within his essay entitled, Notes On Nationalism)
The labyrinthine and mirrored realities in Borges’ fiction, where he often used a first-person narrative to put himself and the reader inside the dreamlike timelessness of the imagined worlds, not unlike the surreal tales of Italo Calvino, remain as glittering reflections of a brilliant mythmaker. In our postmodern lives, tethered by our web of light-speed communication devices and sandblasted by incessant media, we rarely find the space in time to imagine interior worlds. The machinery that we used to recognize as turning the world has become invisible and, in its invisibility, more sinister. The labyrinths are infinite and balanced on the head of a pin. We decide which emails to glance at, which to delete, and which few we will actually read. We discard most of the information flowing at us, through, and around us to avoid going insane. In desperation , we grasp at those books, articles, programs, songs, whatever, that seem to confirm some long-forgotten ideal or value that is buried so deep as to be virtually inaccessible. Even as we take our stands in this presidential election, intellectual evaluations and moral dialectics are nowhere to be found; we react viscerally to the sound bytes of the day. Our hatred for our political opponents is palpable.
While the details may very well be in the gray areas, Americans have experienced brutal, soul-scarring affronts to their collective humanity these past eight years. The eighty-plus percent of the electorate that polls as unhappy with the direction the country is going, has gone, feels the irrevocable shame of what moral depravity the Bush administration has committed in their name, and what lies have been perpetrated over and over to quash any reasonable objections through fear and coercion. However, the reaction against this assault on our collective consciousness is not intellectual or reasoned; it is visceral and divides us almost in half, propelled by intrinsic fear, prejudice, ideological slogans, and gut-level instincts. Metaphorically, as well as politically, the fevered pitch of the rhetoric allows only for choices that are emotionally black or white.
And once again, I have that sinking feeling. The sinking feeling, the abject hopelessness that I, and over the half of the electorate, felt when the Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election. The sinking feeling after 9/11 when something improbably named the Patriot Act was foisted upon us, and we were told to lobby congress to pass this immediately, don’t even read it, pass it or we’ll all die. The sinking feeling when, in the weeks leading up to getting congress to sign away their war powers to Bush, in the Administration’s full-on charge to war with Iraq, Rumsfeld was on every single Sunday talk show (followed by Rice and Cheney) that this needed to pass now, or else we would all die. And now, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is on every single Sunday morning talk show, selling the need for congress to immediately sign on to a clean, i.e. no regulations, no strings attached, no oversight, bill (read this flim-flam Executive Branch power grab here and pay particular attention to [the ironically named] Section 8, Review) without debate or hesitation (sound familiar?), or we’re all going to die (like starving church mice).
The modus operandi is strikingly familiar: present "facts" of impending doom, catastrophic collapse - when was the last time you heard of a "terror alert"? (hint: 2004)- and phony "intelligence" to a closed-door congressional committee. Then announce "bold, government action" (Bush said, "I decided to act, and act boldly"), i.e. bailout (rip-off), and watch the stocks soar like it's Christmas morning on Wall Street. As Naomi Klein said recently, imagine waking up to find that all of your credit card debt, your mortgage, all of your bills and medical debt had been erased (and that someone was going to pay you 20-40 percent of the original value of all those decades of junk in your basement).
During boom times, it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalization for deep cuts to social programs, and for a renewed push to privatize what is left of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly. (emphasis mine) - Naomi Klein, from Free Market Ideology is Far From Finished (9/19/08)
In other words, the right-wing wet dream of burying forever the entitlement programs of FDR and Johnson, i.e., Social Security and Medicare, will be realized, environmental restrictions on companies will be dissipated as too costly, money for infrastructure projects will be non-existent, and so on down this ideological worm hole. After all, the final days are upon us, and only the chosen few shall enjoy the spoils until the sky open up. The Final Act of the Bush Administration is now underway – making way for the Palin theocratic presidency.
- While the dictionary (well, a dictionary ,i.e., Miriam Webster) defines a cynic as one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest. The Cynics (notice the capital C) comprised a 5th century BCE Greek philosophical school derived from Socratic lineage. Ironically, although cynicism3, as we understand it, is pervasive in our politics (and indeed in our views of postmodern life), the philosophical Cynics espoused a life lived following these principles*:
• The goal of life is happiness which is to live in agreement with Nature.
• Happiness depends on being self-sufficient, and a master of mental attitude.
• Self-sufficiency is achieved by living a life of Virtue.
• The road to Virtue is to free oneself from any influence such as wealth, fame, or power, which have no value in Nature.
• Suffering is caused by false judgments of value, which cause negative emotions and a vicious character.
*(with a little help from our wiki-friends)
- I have the habit, which I would not be surprised is very common, of sitting down at the computer just before turning in to peruse the online version of the New York Times, just to be certain that I am tethered enough to this mortal coil that I don’t go drifting into a Borgesian, eternally labyrinthine dream, where time bends in on itself like a moebius strip and finding my way back to the linear experience of my diurnal life is no longer in the cards. So late last Saturday evening, September 13th, I clicked my way from Arts and Literature Daily to the NYT and felt my soul sink as I read,
David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dead at 46 – he died on Friday the 12th at his home...Mr. Wallace was an apparent suicide.
Ten days later and I am still shaking my head in disquietude – how can this be? And yet, if one listened to his voice – the mid-western inflected type of ordinary, soft-spoken but with a slight social tick, challenging but self-deprecating, self- conscious but heroic explicating the abject horror of the ordinary – one could hear the pain, and wonder how difficult, impossible, it must be to bear.
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. –from a short story, The Depressed Person, Harper’s Magazine, January, 1998
It was around the time that story was on the stands that that I drove up to Boston to hear DFW read, with the requisite Q&A following, at Boston Public Library. Without a need to describe anything of that evening, suffice to say that for what ever reasons a certain rainy day at an art gallery, or a recital in a stifling hot room at a college of music, or a walk only a few blocks from where you live takes you past a church with open doors where the Boys Choir of Harlem is singing at it shakes you to your atheist bones, I remember it al with clarity and fondness.
Although I remember being upset with his 2000 Rolling Stone fawning and obsequious profile of John McCain, I was still blown away by his prose and observations. A recent (June) interview reveals how disappointed he had become in McCain (and how he felt misunderstood about his original piece). When asked if he had changed his mind since he wrote the piece:
In the best political tradition, I reject the premise of your question. The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It’s all understandable, of course—he’s the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing. As part of the essay talks about, there’s an enormous difference between running an insurgent Hail-Mary-type longshot campaign and being a viable candidate (it was right around New Hampshire in 2000 that McCain began to change from the former to the latter), and there are some deep, really rather troubling questions about whether serious honor and candor and principle remain possible for someone who wants to really maybe win.
When asked to comment on George Bush and the possibilty that Republicans could try and position themselves as populist:
The truth—as I see it—is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it’s very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.
And when asked about the youth vote:
If nothing else, the previous seven years and four months have helped make it clear that it actually matters a whole, whole lot who gets elected president. A whole lot. There’s also the fact that there are now certain really urgent, galvanizing problems—price of oil, carbon emissions, Iraq—that are apt to get more voters of all ages and education-levels to the polls. For more interested or sophisticated young voters, there are also the matters of the staggering rise in national debt and off-the-books war-funding, the collapse of the dollar, and the grievous damage that’s been done to all manner of consensuses about Constitutional protections, separation of powers, and U.S. obligations under international treaties.
Vade in pace.
- I may be a beat-down cynic, but when I read the original version of this article in the NYT, in one of the final paragraphs it was stated that Chevron had not turned over requested documents in the investigation. The new version of the article omits this fact. That piqued my inveterate cynicism. Hadn't I read about a confluence of actions by Governor Palin relating to Chevron? Indeed I had, as evidenced here, here, and here.